A collection of interests, inspirations, ideas, opinions and outcomes.

Design Principles Gestalt – Lecture

This lecture was about the Gestalt Principle which I had never heard of and had no clue what it was about, but after the lecture understood completely and realised that I have been using it with out even knowing what it was. It is a combination of laws, light suggestions and dynamic design. It is about how viewers respond to design and insures intentions are understood.

In the lecture we learned the when we see objects we want to familiarise the image, if we see two dots and a curved line we associate that with a face. We have an involuntary need to see faces and associate shapes, this need communicates a message to the viewer.

Gestalt is a German word for form unified whole, continuous part.

1. Law of proximity: The closer together a series of objects are the more coherent they become. They look like a group that work together. If one stands apart from the group it is isolated and looks alone an separate.

2. Law of similarity: When we see a remeasuring pattern we tend to notice the out of place and obscure. We can see the odd one out and it doesn’t look right.

3. Law of good continuation: when we as viewers continue the contours of a pattern. Establishing an applied direction.

4. Law of closure: Enclosing a space by completing a contour and ignoring gaps.

5. Law of Pragnanz: Stimulus organised into as symmetrical a shape as possible, simple and organised, for example we would see a square overlapping a triangle rather than two triangles and an odd shape surrounding them.

6. Laws of figure/ground: Stimulus perceived as a separate form is ground for example a doughnut.

7. Laws of point line and form: The brain does things that we do not realise, our heads move with the form and focuses on the dot. We see a design as hierarchy.

These theories are the fundamentals of designs. They are the way the human brain sees and analyses. We follow these principles without even noticing as it is natural to us to deconstruct images in this way. It is a simple, but effective way to improve design. I can now say that I understand the Gestalt theory completely and will carry on using this in my work.